“Anne Bradstreet and Ralph Waldo Emerson both present their beliefs…”

“Both” is a troublesome word for student writers. They join all sorts of people in collaborations never intended by the people themselves. Carping about it in this example may seem extreme—after all, “both” doesn’t necessarily mean “together” or “simultaneously.” But trouble arises before the sentence is over:

“Anne Bradstreet and Ralph Waldo Emerson both present their beliefs in a manner that differs greatly.”

See? The word comes into sentences that are merely talking about two people, not necessarily about two people who are doing similar things. In fact here, they are doing something together that differs. Now, if my student were going on to add a third party—”Anne Bradstreet and Ralph Waldo Emerson both present their beliefs in a manner that differs greatly from Cotton Mather’s,” for example—she might be working on an imaginable idea. But she has no such plans.

Actually Anne Bradstreet’s beliefs and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s differ greatly. So do their manners of presentation—Bradstreet’s in poetry and letters and private meditations, Emerson’s in poetry and essays and sermons. In this survey course students read some of each, so it’s hard to be sure what “manner” is in this student’s mind.

The paper itself was looking at religion in Bradstreet and Emerson and pointing out that they had different ideas about it—not surprisingly, considering their separation in time, denominations, and societal roles. But in this sentence, they’re presenting their beliefs, both of them, in a single manner (we deduce from its singular form), and that single manner differs. From what, we do not know.

One of the words I sometimes want to outlaw for student writers is “both.” In “both-and” sentences the parallelism is almost never achieved; in other sentences we get these unintended partnerships. In other words, its use is both ungrammatical and imprecise. Is this another lost cause in the great battle over English as she is spoke?

6 responses to ““Anne Bradstreet and Ralph Waldo Emerson both present their beliefs…””

Obviously the student has noticed they both used letters and words and punctuation and capitalization to present ideas. Guess the types of sentences used by authors varied?
Can we also outlaw the TV news media’s use of “up” in sentences such as “up the building security”?

Ah yes. I guess I did overlook the obvious…which is often exactly what the student is writing about….
The problem with expressions like “up the building security,” which might be nice once in awhile, is that they take over the language to the extent that we can’t remember what words or phrases they replaced. “Issue.” “Prompt.” “At the end of the day.” “Relatable” (my candidate for this year’s most loathesome and vague trend-word). And then the odd prepositional invasions: “based off of,” “centered around,” and the “in” that seems to have attached itself to “which”: This is a situation in which I don’t want to find myself in. He is the person in which I am attracted to. What are they READING, to write this way?

UB strike
An archive of the events, documents, and correspondence of the faculty strike at the University of Bridgeport 1990-1992, the longest strike in academic history. If you don’t know this story, you should!

UB strike
An archive of the events, documents, and correspondence of the faculty strike at the University of Bridgeport 1990-1992, the longest strike in academic history. If you don’t know this story, you should!